At that point, he had not yet spoken to his family in Hailey, Idaho, where a big homecoming celebration was canceled amid a firestorm over the circumstances of his disappearance and debate over the prisoner exchange that won his release.

Some of Bergdahl's fellow former soldiers have portrayed him as a deserter who walked off a remote outpost in eastern Afghanistan before he was captured.

They claim other service members were killed looking for him, but Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel disputed that during a congressional hearing on Wednesday.

The Pentagon says the details of how Bergdahl ended up in enemy hands will be investigated, but has defended the secret deal that freed him.

The trade has been attacked by members of Congress who are outraged that they were not told ahead of time, and by those who say the five Taliban detainees transferred out of Guantanamo Bay to Qatar were too dangerous to free.

First published June 12 2014, 10:35 AM

Jim Miklaszewski

Jim Miklaszewski is the chief Pentagon correspondent for NBC News. On 9/11, he was the first at the scene to report that the Pentagon had been attacked and has since led the network's coverage of the war in Afghanistan.

Since joining NBC in 1985, Miklaszewski was a White House correspondent during the Clinton and Bush administrations, covering President Clinton's transition from Little Rock, his many trips abroad including Moscow and the Middle East and his reelection. He was also an NBC floor reporter at the Democratic and Republican conventions in 1996 and 2000.

In the Bush White House, Miklaszewski reported on the Gulf War with Iraq, summits with Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin and the Bush reelection campaign in 1992.

Miklaszewski has logged considerable foreign experience with battlefront coverage of wars in Lebanon, El Salvador and the Falkland Islands. He also covered the United States air raid on Libya, and the "tanker wars" in the Persian Gulf.